When I write, I like to stick to one thing until it is finished.
I have not been doing this lately as I have started a story only to abandon it.
I had a story about virtual reality and post-singularity, a Stross rip-off. Abandoned because I couldn’t figure out the rules of the virtual world.
Next I started a Spelljammer assassination story. Abandoned because I couldn’t get the voices of the emperor or the assassin right. Plus, I wasn’t done with the world building. I might work on something else in this world later.
Next I am thinking of starting a sequel to my “buying women” anti-feminist story. No, I’m not an anti-feminist, blah, blah, blah. I was just pushing the boundaries in fiction. This story got the biggest reaction in my writing class so there’s a lot of energy there. Negative energy, but still. I’d rather have that than blah.
Which is totally hypocritical because I hate it when other authors push all the negative buttons, but hey what can I do?
We’ll see how long this story lasts. At least there’s some “writing energy” there.
I had totally forgotten about the notion of “writing energy” which is that pep when you start a short story. Or at least it was the pep I felt. I lost it over the years. What has replaced it is a sticky tenacity that ensures that the story gets done regardless of how I feel.
If I could just combine those feelings together, I might actually finish something.
A few of my short stories have been failing lately, and I could not figure out why. Then I realized it. I didn’t have any real characters!
I had cardboard stand-ins such as an assassain. Yes, he has the coolest powers and weapons that can be borrowed from wikipedia, yet he didn’t really have a reason …
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Last night I had a great conversation about Delany’s ideas on fiction writing. The first thing is that we agreed that how much we enjoy his sightings of him varies depending upon his audience. For example, I wish his movie talked more about his writing. Also, there are these people who follow him around and …
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Charles Stross had a good post on Betchel’s law. Basically, if you have two women in a story, you should have them speak to one another about something other than men, marriage, and children. I’m going to try to do this with my next story. In fact, I’ll just convert some stock stereotype men to …
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I recently enjoyed “Transformations” by David Kirtley. He was my Clarion bathroom mate. I have not spoken to him since Clarion, but I have sporadically been reading his blog just like all the other Clarionites I knew.
Anyway, I liked this story as it showed a relationship between a boy and a robot that didn’t involve …
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If you could be any creature, any mobile life form at all, which would it be and why?
I would be a plant because then I could sit around all day doing nothing.
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I think the X + punk idea has gone a bit too far.
I was never really sure what cyberpunk was all about. Sure, I knew how it felt, but when asked, I could never put it into words. I think the best way is to point people toward the books by a small core of …
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I love Charles Stross. Here is a story for free by him.
I like this world he has created. Basically the premise is that the very fact of _knowing_ about certain mathematical principles can mess up the universe because math == magic. This leads to interesting conclusions like casting spells with a PDA.
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Yesterday, while I was getting tix for the Delany movie, Polymath, I noticed some Japanese horror movies.
One of them was cool because it had Sarah Michelle Geller in it as a heroine so it would be like Buffy without the super powers. It was called the Grudge. Then there was this series of movies about …
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I have been thinking of new worlds lately, and this means research. For me, it requires reading history books, but to get the last pizzazz, I have to go further. I usually turn to the times when I was really impressed with a SF idea, which was usually when I was a child.
Often this is …
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